ABSTRACT
BEFORE considering the military action which thrust Japan back into the Middle Ages and re-established the soldier as the ruler of Japan, we must make a brief survey of the field chosen for the military power’s assertion of supremacy. In the war of 1904-5 Japan had “saved Manchuria from Russia,” whose rights she took over as far as Changchun; and Japan always lauded her own altruism in this act when she wished to justify a claim to some advantage as justly due to her. Where development by Russia had been a crime, development by Japan was a high virtue, and the Japanese propagandists were very fond of exhibiting photographs showing how much further Japan had gone than Russia. A new railway line from Antung, on the Korean border, connected with the Korean railway by a bridge, was constructed, but this was strategic rather than economic so far as Manchuria was concerned. Coal and iron mining, salt working, iron smelting, distillation of shale oil, created large industrial interests. Above all, the cultivation of the soya bean brought prosperity. But though one enterprise succeeded another and the South Manchuria Railway continually put out fresh tentacles, it was always “the blood and treasure poured out on the plains of Manchuria” that was invoked as creating Japan’s indefeasible claims to whatever she might require in that region. Invested capital riveted her position, but the sentimental claim always came first. In the hands of numerous propagandists, not a few of them foreign hirelings, Japan’s claims were continually flourished in the face of the world. The main points were:
Manchuria is a No Man’s Land and never was part of China.
